The hazards of occupation: documentaries by and about Palestinians and Israelis in the occupied territories.(Report)

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a classic "hot-potato" issue, on which there are widely divergent, bitterly contested viewpoints, making nonfiction documentation of Israel's occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank an ideological minefield. Where do you go? Whom do you talk to, or against? Is it possible to achieve a "balanced" presentation? Can one provide enough historical, social, and political context to make the key issues comprehensible for the average viewer?

Occupation, to paraphrase Portia from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, is twice cursed. It curses those who enforce it as well as those under occupation. In the last forty-two years, it would seem no occupation has been more cursed than Israel's venture in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It is an occupation that has involved not only Israeli society in the form of military service, but also Western societies, namely the U.S. through economic and military aid. In addition, the occupation has so divided parts of Israeli society itself as to rip it asunder.

Most tragically, it has driven the Palestinian population to its knees and reduced them to statistics, if not invisibility, in terms of U.S. media coverage.

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Violence is the daily vocabulary of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where the recent Israeli military assault, supposedly targeting Hamas militants, left 1300 Palestinians and thirteen Israelis dead in twenty-two days. Recent reports in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz tell of Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers confessing to the murder of Palestinian civilians during the December 2008 invasion. Other reports claim that the Israelis used white phosphorous. Meanwhile, the United Nations is currently working on an investigation of such alleged war crimes, as international voices call for trials. If even a third of these reports are true, then Israeli society is in for a new and painful bout of soul-searching

According to the late Israeli writer, Tanya Reinhart, a carefully groomed narrative is presented to the world, especially in the U.S., of a beleaguered democratic Israeli "David" trying mightily to protect itself from a psychopathic, terrorist Palestinian "Goliath." Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land (PPPL) is a good starting point from which to question assumptions commonly held by Americans in regards to the occupied territories. Codirected by Sut Jhally and Bathsheba Ratzkoff, PPPL is designed to analyze U.S. media coverage of the conflict and to provide closer examination of such issues as the Camp David Accords, Israeli settlements, and the nature of daily life under the occupation. Because PPPL was finished in 2004, it does not deal with either the 2006 elections or Israel's latest incursion into the Gaza Strip. Nonetheless, this is a compelling documentary that puts today's events into sharp perspective.

The eighty-minute film is a dense, informative piece divided into segments averaging eight to ten minutes each, featuring interviews with an impressive array of informed voices who discuss the conflict, including author Noam Chomsky, the journalists Robert Fisk (The Independent) and Alisa Solomon (The Village Voice), and Hanan Ashrawi, a Christian Palestinian legislator and scholar. The film squarely places a large responsibility for the present conditions in the occupied territories on the U.S. Given that Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, including military supplies and weapons, it is, says Hussein Ibish, Communications Director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, an occupation "stamped Made in the U.S.A." Noam Chomsky readily concurs, stating that the American public needs to wake up to what is being done in their name.